I won’t be trick or treating this year. No parties, no bars. No make-up, no dress-up, no costumes. This Halloween will be the real deal. Un Dia de los Muertos to remember. Some serious self-exploration that may scare the bejesus
I won’t be trick or treating this year. No parties, no bars. No make-up, no dress-up, no costumes.
This Halloween will be the real deal. Un Dia de los Muertos to remember. Some serious self-exploration that may scare the bejesus out of me but bring me closer to some kind of truth.
Time to put myself out there and see what other spirits we can explore.
There’s a few North Shore haunts and others on the Westside that may prove worthwhile for some late-night exploration. Some places, I hear, dramatically alter when the sun slips into the Pacific. Some, I’m told, have decades and even centuries of forgotten pasts.
Stories of Ko‘olau the Leper resurfaced in Monday’s edition as part of The Garden Island’s 50-day, 50-story feature in celebration of Kaua‘i Museum’s golden anniversary. The article notes that the leader of lepers fighting the government’s forced relocation of the diseased to Moloka‘i was also a respected marksman.
But the devoted husband (Ko‘olau was enraged in large part because the authorities would not allow his wife, Pi‘ilani, to accompany him to Kalawao) became a murderer when on June 27, 1893, he shot Louis Stolza, a sheriff’s deputy from Waimea.
The moral question that lingers is whether the shot he fired was a righteous kill. In Jack London’s “Ko‘olau the Leper” we get a look at where Ko‘olau was coming from: “Because we are sick they take away our liberty. We have obeyed the law. We have done no wrong. And yet they would put us in prison. Moloka‘i is a prison. … Brothers, is it not strange? Ours was the land, and behold, the land is not ours. What did these preachers of the word of God and the word of Rum give us for the land?”
Less well known are Stolza’s parting words to H.P. Fayé at Mana: “If he kills me, I will send my ghost to tell you.” Judge C.B. Hofgaard says in his tale that soon thereafter, in the dead of the night, “the dogs made a terrible noise, and Fayé got up to find out the cause for all the barking and he heard a voice saying “E Paea, ua make o Lui” (Fayé, Louis is dead).
I’ll have my eyes and ears open for signs of Stolza tonight as we ramble in the dark over the hills and across streams. Maybe he, or even Ko‘olau, will have some feelings they’d like to imbue.
So if you see one crazy-eyed editor running down Kuhio Highway with his headlamp bouncing amid the traffic, pay him no mind. He is simply trying to connect with the energy around us. It just might take some practice before he learns how to handle it in a way that doesn’t utterly freak him out.
